1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer-implemented system and method for culling relevant information from an electronic file. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a system and method for extracting relevant data from an electronic file and populating a database with the relevant data to allow a user or another program to further analyze and manipulate the data.
2. Description of Related Art
Tools for converting between document formats are well known in the art. For example, a conventional document format converter might take a portable document format (PDF) file and convert the file into a document that can be opened, read, and edited by a word processing program. The aim of these conventional converters is to allow a user access and possibly edit the content of the document in its current form, without adding any value to the content of the document. Conventional converters are designed to convert text, images, and other elements of a document from one format to another format while maintaining the look and feel of the original document as much as possible. The conventional converters are designed to simply recreate the text from the converted document; they do not categorize or index the text to make it more useful.
There is a need for a system that culls relevant data from documents stored in various electronic formats and converts the data into a form that can be indexed, manipulated, and stored in a database, allowing the data to be used by analytical programs that interpret the data and that are able to create reports based on the interpreted data. Accordingly, the present invention is directed to systems and methods of extracting data from an electronic document that meet these needs.